New York: Forge Books, 2021
320 pp. $27.99 (hardcover)
The late Texas writer Elmer Kelton is well known to fans of Westerns. He was even named the “greatest Western writer of all time” by the Western Writers of America. Yet few among the broader reading public have ever heard his name. Whereas the nation’s leading literary critics gave renown to such authors as Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy, they generally ignored Kelton, or regarded him as a merely regional or niche author, despite the fact that he wrote a half dozen of the best American novels of the 20th century.
That is a shame, and we should be grateful that Forge Books has been working to keep Kelton’s fiction available for readers interested in stories that exemplify the virtues that built the American West. Law of the Land is the fourth in a series of collections of Kelton’s short stories that Forge has published in recent years—the others being The Cowboy Way (2020), Hard Ride (2018), and Wild West (2017). Like the others, it combines some of his earliest work, which appeared in pulp magazines in the 1950s, with stories from the 1970s and 1980s that have never before been published.
One reason critics often ignored Kelton was that his novels celebrate the virtues of integrity, honor, hard work, and bravery, with none of the nihilism that pervades McCarthy’s books or the mournfulness that marks McMurtry’s. “Critics don’t read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter,” Kelton once said.1 That may sound bitter, but it’s largely true. Beginning in the late 1960s, Westerns—which in the previous decade had been the most popular form of entertainment in America—gradually shifted away from the culturally confident, life-affirming tone so noticeable in, say, Shane or John Wayne movies, toward the ultraviolent existentialism found in The Wild Bunch and the “spaghetti Westerns.” Some authors, including McMurtry, remained true to the values of the classic Westerns, but depicted them in nostalgic or elegiac tones, implying that these values were obsolete or inherently futile. For Kelton, by contrast, the honesty, gallantry, and stubbornness of the frontier age remained as essential in the present as they ever were, and his chief masterpieces—The Time It Never Rained, The Day the Cowboys Quit, The Good Old Boys, Stand Proud, The Wolf and the Buffalo, and, to a lesser extent, The Man Who Rode Midnight—depict these principles as keys to the good life. . . .
Born in 1926, Kelton started working as a journalist immediately after graduating from the University of Texas in 1948—an education interrupted by army service during World War II. He began writing short stories for pulp magazines such as Ranch Romances and was extraordinarily prolific, but the truth is that Kelton’s strength was not in short stories. Most of those collected here and in the previous anthologies are forgettable, even formulaic. For example, “Relics” from 1978 and the previously unpublished “Biscuits for a Bandit,” are essentially the same tale: An aged chuckwagon cook cleverly poisons a bandit who steals food from him. Intended as light entertainment, these and other of Kelton’s short pieces rarely attempted much in the way of characterization, and none attain the literary depth of his best work.
Reading them today, however, one can detect glimmers of what made Kelton great. For instance, Ike Ballantine, the protagonist of his 1950 “North of the Big River,” bears a notable resemblance to Charlie Flagg, the main character of The Time It Never Rained, published in 1973. Ballantine is a gruff, cantankerous ranch owner who shelters a wounded Mexican immigrant who’s fleeing a gang of rustlers led by Ballantine’s neighbor. Ballantine and the migrant come to admire each other’s courage when they confront the neighbor and wind up in a shootout. In The Time It Never Rained, Flagg, too, makes an alliance of mutual respect with a Mexican immigrant while he struggles through a severe drought that threatens to destroy his ranch, and the two become friends against overwhelming odds.
The novel was based on real events and real people—the proud and independent ranchers Kelton got to know when reporting for newspapers about the infamous Texas dry spell of 1949–1957. Pressured to accept government aid, Flagg refuses, insisting that he will find a way to manage on his own. When a reporter asks him why, he replies, “I just don’t believe in askin’ somebody else to pay my way.” His neighbors and even his son harass him to accept federal handouts, but Flagg explains:
If you’d go in my wife’s kitchen you’d see an old pet cat curled up close to the stove. She’s fat and lazy. If a mouse was to run across the kitchen floor, that old cat wouldn’t hardly stir a whisker. She’s been fed everything she wanted. She depends on us. If we went off someday and left her, she’d starve. But out at the barn there’s cats that can spot a mouse across two corrals. I never feed them. They rustle for theirselves, and they do a damn good job of it. If I was to leave they’d never miss me. All they need is a chance to operate. They may not be as fat as the old pet, but I’d say they’re healthier. And they don’t have to rub somebody’s leg for what they get. Now, you can call me old-fashioned if you want to—lots of people do—but I’d rather be classed with them go-getters out in the barn than with that old gravy-licker in the kitchen.2
Kelton’s first novel, Hot Iron, appeared in 1956, and more than fifty books followed, including a memoir and a collection of news articles. But it was in 1971 that he achieved greatness, with The Day the Cowboys Quit. Also based on a real-life incident—an 1883 cowboy strike against five Texas ranches—that novel’s main character is a foreman named Hugh Hitchcock who initially sides with his boss, Prosper Selkirk, to put down a labor dispute. Selkirk has always treated his men fairly, Hitchcock thinks, and he decides their demand for higher wages is unfair. But when the strike ends, Selkirk dispatches ruffians to kill its leaders, and Hitchcock feels betrayed. He announces his candidacy for sheriff, and, once elected, brings charges against Selkirk and his allies. In the end, Hitchcock explains, it does not matter much whether they are convicted: What matters is that he has stood up for a principle.
One detects a foretaste of this magnificent novel in “In the Line of Duty,” a 1967 story included here, in which Texas Ranger Duncan McLendon must hunt down a friend and fellow ranger named Litt Springer, who has abandoned his duties as a lawman and is now simply murdering criminals. When McLendon learns that a third ranger, Billy Hutto, has been helping Springer, he confronts Billy:
“I thought you were a Ranger.”
“I am. But I’m a friend of Litt Springer’s, too.”
“Right now you can’t be both. . . . You better go to Austin, Billy.”
Billy was incredulous. “And leave you?”
“I don’t want a man with me unless he’s with me all the way. You took an oath, Billy. If you can’t live up to it, you better turn that badge in.”
After McLendon finishes the awful task of dispatching Springer, he immediately turns to his next job: finding and arresting the criminals his dishonored friend was pursuing.
The stories collected here and in the earlier anthologies are entertaining and sometimes clever—the 2009 story “Born to Be Hanged,” for instance, features a _Twilight Zone-_like premise in which a bandit arranges to have henchmen fake his execution, only to be double-crossed by a fellow criminal—but for anyone familiar with Kelton’s later works, they come off as mere appetizers.
In his best books, Kelton wrote with such grace, and designed his plots with such care, as to smoothly convey his themes without degenerating into mere morality plays or overly tidy episodic tales. The Good Old Boys, for example, tells the story of two brothers: Walter, who is committed to settling down to family life on the farm; and Hewey, who wants to retain his independence as a cowboy on the range. When Walter breaks his leg, Hewey must substitute for him behind the plow, giving Kelton a brilliant opportunity to tell a story that captures the conflict that so many men feel as they grow older, between wanting to retain their youthful freedom and wanting to build a family and a legacy.
Kelton accentuates this clever integration of plot and theme by setting the novel in 1906, three years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, so that on another level, he can apply his theme to the closing of the frontier era and the arrival of modernity. In the end, Hewey persuades Walter to let his son go to the big city to become a mechanic—recognizing that in this new age, the independent spirit of the West will find its place in technological progress. Written with a rare blend of comedy and profundity, The Good Old Boys is a nearly perfect specimen of what animates the finest Westerns: a seemingly simple story that tackles some of life’s deepest philosophical dilemmas.
Kelton’s admiration for the virtues that tamed the frontier was not confined to stories about cowboys and lawmen, either. In The Wolf and the Buffalo (1980), he also explored how people outside of white, American society viewed the settlement of the West, and he honored their struggles and courage, too. That novel tells two parallel stories featuring a former slave-turned-cavalryman named Gideon Ledbetter and a Comanche warrior named Gray Horse. When Ledbetter’s unit sets out to kill Grey Horse’s band, they get lost on Texas’s waterless Llano Estacado in a spellbinding conclusion that examines the two men’s outsider status vis-à-vis the white culture of 19th-century Texas. Kelton’s skill at designing plots to dramatize his themes is particularly noticeable in a passage in which Ledbetter’s fellow Buffalo Soldier, a man named Big Dempsey, abandons any hope of integrating into white society and persuades himself that because whites do not accept him, he should join the Comanche instead. He steals his unit’s horses as a peace offering to the Indians—who, alas, cannot understand English:
Clearly nervous but determined, the big black soldier rode up and stopped so close that Gray Horse could almost have touched the horse’s nose. The man raised his right hand, palm out. “I am a friend,” he said. . . . “I have come to join up with my friends the Comanches. We’ll fight the white people together. Looky here, I’ve brought horses.”
Gray Horse said, “I think he wants to give them to us.”
Bear laughed without humor. “He will give them to us. All four of them.”
Dempsey’s eyes betrayed the beginnings of alarm. “I come to you all on my own. I’ve left the soldiers. I hate the white man same as you do. I want to be your friend.”
Terrapin drew his bow. Dempsey caught the movement and looked toward him, seeing to his horror what the warrior intended to do.
“No,” he protested in a shout that was half scream. “I’m your friend. . . .”
He was not quite dead when Terrapin stepped down and began cutting his scalp, which was his right.
Limping Boy mused, “I wonder what he was trying to tell us.”3
In such passages, Kelton managed to combine a respect for the clashing conceptions of virtue that marked the conflict between settlers and tribes—and a recognition of the tragedy of 19th-century race hate—with a respect for the fact that only civilization offers any hope for a future of justice. Dempsey’s fantasy that he can make peace with the Comanche—notoriously among the fiercest warriors on the continent—represents a kind of madness, a countercultural delusion that, since at least the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has led many people into self-destructive pseudo-revolutionary ideologies.4 Whether it be the American communists who moved to the Soviet Union in the 1930s only to wind up in labor camps, or the black nationalists who, thirty years later, denounced American culture as racist and oppressive and joined militant groups that were little more than violent and oppressive street gangs, people who romanticize their rejection of contemporary civilization frequently learn, as Dempsey does, that things are worse beyond the pale. In passages like this, Kelton’s novels rose above the clichéd good-versus-evil stories sometimes found in Westerns and reached a truly literary level of insight—unlike the pretentious nihilism of such novels as, say, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.
Kelton wrote many potboilers without pretense to literary distinction—and many of those are collected here. But at his best, he was a genuinely great artist, and if these recent anthologies help bring his name to a wider public, they will have done much good.